Welcome to the Official website for the Mind Sport of Memory and the home of the World Memory Championships, the greatest test of Memory in the world. You can register here to compete, find out how the sport works, follow the achievements of competitors or see the results of competitions worldwide. If you are interested in forming a memory club, or staging a competition you will find our contact details on the About Us page.

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Chris Day, General Secretary, World Memory Championships

Jonas von Essen wins the 2013 UK Open Memory Championships

The winner of the UK Open Memory Championships is Jonas von Essen from Sweden with 7630 Championship points. The UK Memory Champion was Ben Pridmore with 5094. Silver Medalist was James Paterson with 3721 and Bronze Medla was won by Mike Outram with 1723.

On the following morning, Jonas accompanied by General Secretary Chris Day were on the sofa on BBC Breakfast which was seen by 7 million viewers. CLICK HERE to see the full scores and results.

Can Mind Sports help us delay the effects of old age?

Matt, the cartoonist, memorably created a cartoon about when the pensioners were marching on Downing Street with placards proclaiming 'What do we want?Where are we going? Why are we here?' However, our memory or the increasing lack of it, is no longer a laughing matter.It is the one thing that we fear losing the most.What’s the point of enjoying a ripe old age if you've forgotten about it by the time you got home?

With so many of us using our Smart phones, tablet devices and computers to do all our remembering for us, is it any wonder that memory is a dying art?These days few people can even remember ten items on a shopping list! Can you?Don't forget - with memory it is use it or lose it!

Competitors to the UK Open Memory Championships on August 22nd and 23rd in the ScienceMuseum, are determined to prove that anyone is capable of surprising feats of memory if only they knew some very simple techniques, and practiced a bit.

The UK Open Memory Championships, now in its seventh year, has become the warm up event to the World Memory Championships taking place later this year in the UK.It being the most comprehensive test of competitive memory on the planet, is why competitors are prepared to travel so far to see how their months of preparation can take them compared to the best in the world.

Back in the last century, in 1991 Dominic O'Brien, at a spritely 34, was the very first World Memory Champion,an incredible feat that he repeated a further seven time to become the only person ever to be the eight times World Memory Champion.

Now with memory competitions held in 26 countries around the world, he chose to retire from being a competitor to become the Head of Ethics for the Mind Sport of Memory. But last year, at age 55 he surprised everyone and competed in the UK Open. Did he still have what it takes! Absolutely – he achieved personal bests in almost every discipline, proving that age is no barrier to memory. You can push back your mental age by giving your brain a daily workout some simple techniques.

In fact none of the competitors taking part in the UK Open were born with particularly good memories. For all of them, this is a skill they have developed by learning the techniques and doing lots of practice – just like any other sport.

In this way, they can remember long - very, very long - lists of things: numbers - 4140 binary digits in 30 minutes; dates - 101 historical dates in 5 minutes;playing cards – 1404 playing cards in one hour (that’s 27 packs of playing cards, individually shuffled and memorised, perfectly, in just 60 minutes - imagine!)

It all started in 1991 with a conversation between Tony Buzan and Raymond Keene OBE. "Why," asked Tony "when there are competitions for almost everything else, are there no competitions for memory, the most important function of the brain?"

So it was that two two founders of the sport, took the decision to invite the top memorisers in the world at that time, to join a competition to establish the first World Memory Champion.

This took place as Memoriad '91 on Saturday October 26th 1991 in London's Athenaeum Club in front of over 100 spectators, journalist and film crews.

News of the event shot round the world and made an overnight star of the first winner, Dominic O'Brien, who went on to win a total of eight times. It was from this modest begining that the sport started, and is now practiced in over 30 countries around the world.